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A Comparison of 

LANCASTER, ENGLAND 

and 

LANCASTER, PENNSYLVANIA 

By 
WILBERFORCE W. NEVIN 

Written in 1880 

in Lancaster, England, for the Philadelphia Press 

of which he was then Associate Editor 



This reprint made hy Walter C. Hager thrmgh 
the courtesy of Miss Alice Nevin, Lancaster, Pa., and Miss Blanche Nerin, 
Windsor Forges, Lancasi^ County, Pa. 



V. 



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A Comparison of 

Lancaster, England, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania 

By 

Welberforce W. Nevin 

Written in 1880 in Lancaster, Englmid, for the Philadelphia 

Press, of which he was then Associate Editor. 



Pennsylvania, in her State nomenclatnre, bears per- 
petual testimony to the affectionate remembrance in 
which the early English settlers ever held their old coun- 
try, keeping green in the names of the new land the 
memory of the old homes they should see no more in 
this world. The extent and detail in which this has 
been done is quite remarkable, although it often escapes 
notice until it is forced on one's attention by finding in 
a strange land place after place with the old familiar 
names. This systematic reproduction sometimes al- 
most makes the new land seem like a shadow of the old. 

There are here a Carlisle to^m., ''on Avhich the sun 
shines fair," which is the county-seat of Cumberland; 
a Reading, the county-seat of Berkshire; a Lancaster, 
the county-to^vn of Lancashire; a York, the county- 
town of Yorkshire; a Chester, the cathedral city of 
Cheshire; a Huntingdon, in Huntingdon County; and 
a Bedford, in Bedford County. There are a Bucks 
County, a Montgomery County, a Westmoreland County, 
a Northampton County, a Somerset County, a North- 
umberland County; and in detached towns and villages, 
streams, tov^iiships, and so on, one might run the list 
out indefinitely. 

In this Lancaster from which I write one can trace 
the family relationship even to minuter detail. There 
are here from old a King Street and a Queen Street 



A COMPARISON OF LANCASTEB, ENGLAND 

and a Little Duke Street, and St. Mary's, James', High, 
Market, Water, Ann, Church, and Middle Streets. Our 
Prince Street is here Prince Regent Street. There are 
a St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church and a Phoenix 
Foundry, which may, for aught I Iniow, be the parent of 
our Phoenixville Iron-Works. 

England's Lancaster, like Pennsylvania's, is a town 
of something over twenty thousand people and the 
centre of a Lancaster County, but between the two 
counties there is no parallel. England's Lancashire has 
nearly three millions of population. It is relatively 
one of the largest counties of England, having an acre- 
age of one million two hundred and eight thousand 
acres. During this century it has become the centre of 
the cotton trade, and cities like Manchester and Liver- 
pool, with their hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, 
have sprung up within its borders, but little Lancaster 
town, with its old church and castle and the prestige of 
its Roman camp, is still the historic county-town, the 
seat of its dignity and honor. England rather looks 
down on new-made wealth unconsecrated by religion, 
learning, blood, or traditions of arms. 

Although a place of perhaps several thousand inhab- 
itants less than our Pennsylvania town, this Lancaster 
presents a much more imposing appearance. It is built 
entirely of stone, giving it a very solid and substantial 
air, while the tints of the stone, grays of every hue, pro- 
duce a much handsomer effect than anything that could 
be gotten from bricks. The central view from the old 
Main Street, looking up the rising slope of the hill, 
covered with quaint gables and buttressed walls, and 
finally culminating in the castellated masses of John of 
Gaunt 's great tower, is one of the finer pictures of in- 
terior England, and architecturally quite striking. It 
is an irregular town of narrow streets, rambling up and 
down hills of even steeper grade than those of our own 
Lancaster, and plunging every now and then into dark and 
dingy hollows that are more picturesque than reputable. 
It is, however, very reasonably free, for England, from 
beggary and want, and its approaches to the country are 

, [2] 



AND LANCASTEB, PENNSYLVANIA. 

generally through pleasant lanes lined with comfortable 
cottages or small houses festooned with flowers, and each 
with its little garden of green grass or foliage presenting 
a pleasing picture of comfort and modest refinement. 

It was on a market morning I came to Lancaster, and 
the look of things was very familiar. King Street was 
lined with unhorsed wagons and carts and vehicles of all 
kinds from the country. In the large, spacious courts or 
interior yards of the inns were throngs of people surging 
out into the streets and back again. In the stalls and 
tap-rooms the men were gathered, talking and selling and 
buying; in the stores and shops, the women. Farther 
down into the town the scene became more distinctly 
English and provincial, the market shifting into a kind of 
fair,— noisy, cheap, and rough. Here all kinds of things 
were being sold at vendue, half a dozen rude auctioneers 
standing ahnost with their backs to each other, each with 
a barrel covered with a sheet-iron plate as his stand or 
counter. All of them cried their wares at the top of 
their voices, and pounded with a hammer on the. iron 
plates in order to emphasize their yelling.^ The music 
was Wagneresque. It was a simple realistic opera that 
told very well the story of rustic England. Nevertheless, 
through all this din and disorderly noise the transfer of 
property, after a fashion, went pretty rapidly on. The 
things sold were small wares of a cheap kind, — rough 
china, tin, ready-made clothing. Everything was rude, 
petty, and humble. 

One touch of local color which I certainly thought to 
have come on here is conspicuously wanting. I had 
surely expected to see again in this ancient Lancaster 
the ''Bed Lion," and the "Leopard," and the "Black 
Bear," and the "White Swan," and the "Cross-Keys," 
and "The Grapes," all in goodly state with substantial 
coaches in front of them, and sanded floors, and bur- 
nished pewter, and warm welcome, and good cheer in- 
side, but they are not here. Nor did I find any inn signs 
or names at all in the old place which have survivedin 
the new,— a missing link in the chain of succession which 
seems rather singular. 

[3] 



A COMPARISON OF LANCASTER, ENGLAND 

The most marked contrast between the two Lancas- 
ters is the entire absence here of any Teutonic element. 
The place is very English, with even less trace of the 
Saxon than in most parts of England. Lancaster has 
very sensibly felt the influence of the Celtic settlement 
to the north, south, and west of it,^ — Scotland, Wales 
and Ireland,^and you see this blood-stamp clearly in 
the forms and structure of the people, especially in the 
women, who have more of the French' and Irish race 
characteristics of feature and movement than any I have 
met in any part of England. This Avas easily distinguish- 
able both in the farmers' daughters in the markets and 
in the faces and carriage of the townswomen whom I 
saw in church. There was a distinctly warmer color- 
ing of hair, a greater elasticity of step and fluency of 
motion, than belongs to the average English woman of 
other sections of the land. Being the last stronghold 
against the Danes and Saxons and invading Northmen 
of all kinds coming in from the east, it is but natural 
that 'this northwest quarter of England should retain 
most strongly the blood and features of the earliest 
races. 

From the time of the Wars of the Eoses, Lancashire 
has always been a place noted for its political activity, 
and just now it is in active motion, organizing already 
for the next Parliamentary election. At present it sends 
a strongly Conservative delegation to Parliament, not- 
withstanding the radical leaning of such places as Man- 
chester and Liverpool and Preston, a manufacturing 
town of one hundred thousand. The county, apart from 
these towns, sends eight members, all Conservative, two 
of whom are in the Cabinet. Preston sends two Con- 
servatives, Liverpool two Conservatives and one Liberal,' 
and Manchester two Liberals and one Conservative, these 
latter two great towns just pairing off each other's in- 
fluence. The voting list of Lancashire, when all the dis- 
tricts are footed up, seems pretty high, but it must be 
remembered that under the English system one man may 
easily cast three votes, or even more. 

[4] 



AND LANCASTER, PENNSYLVANIA. 

For instance, in Lancashire, a man living in Preston 
or Liverpool might easily have three votes, thns : 

1. If in his town he is a registered property-owner 
or rent-payer, he has a vote there. This is the first, and, 
according to English feeling, the lower grade of 
franchise. The man votes as one average, industrious, 
respectable subject of the kingdom. 

2. If this same man is of a county family, owning 
estates in the county, he may also vote on the county list. 
Here he votes his family birth and historic connection 
with the kingdom, 

3. If this same voter, who has already cast two 
legitimate votes, is an educated man, he may vote again 
on the registry list of his university, which sends its 
members to Parliament. Here he votes his education. 

Lastly, as far as he may be able to influence or assist 
in the appointment of a bishop, he also votes again, the 
bishops being lords, who sit in the iipper House. 

It is this delicately-adopted system of the representa- 
tion of interests, of birth, of education, of religion, of 
classes, of labor, of money, etc., which makes all mere 
figures so deceptive and illusory in treating of English 
politics. The English statesman resents the mathemati- 
cal basis of representation as being merely an averaging 
and levelling process. 

English Lancaster has just three weekly newspapers. 
Here, as in the case of Reading, our Pennsylvania towns 
so far outstrip their old-country parents that any com- 
parison is out of the question. It is the same way in 
old Carlisle, which, with a population of thirty-five 
thousand, publishes only weekly journals, and but three 
of them. 

Our young Lancaster of the New World — if you will 
subtract from it all the presence and influence of the 
great German blood, which it could so ill do without — is 
a pretty fair reproduction of this old town. That is the 
only marked difference. You do not hear a grateful Ger- 
man word here, or see the trace of a single Germanic 
custom, usage, or tradition. 

[5] 



A COMPARISON OF LANCASTER, ENGLAND 

There are no great barns here; no red-faced farmer 
boys with their shining buggies and well-fed horses in 
the streets; no staid and decorous Mennonite elders 
with solid and prosperous air; no German books or 
papers or almanacs in the shop-windows; none and 
nothing of that honest, strong, and historic race which 
has contributed so much to the wealth and glory of our 
Lancaster County, and which is now perhaps its better 
half,— only their English cousins of like manner and 
degree. You find here fresh and in clear outline the 
Lancaster of our young past ; the Lancaster that clus- 
tered around the old-fashioned court-house; the Lan- 
caster of old King and Queen and Duke Streets; the 
Lancaster of the Old Bar and of the country '^ manors" 
of gone times; the Lancaster that used to come in from 
Carnarvon and Coleraine and Little Britain and the 
'4ower end"; the Lancaster of the Yates and Cun- 
ninghams and Lardners and Montgomerys and Frank- 
lyns and Jenkins and Bartons laid away in their family 
graves forever. Here it is, drinking port and sitting in 
stately old Windsor chairs and burning wax tapers and 
swearing at dignified butlers and powdered footmen yet. 

In their respective relation to the adjacent country 
there is a strong resemblance between the two Lancas- 
ters. Lancaster of England is situated on the pleasing 
river Lune, which, when the tide is out, is nearly as 
respectable a stream as our Conestoga Creek; when the 
tide is in it is something larger. While the county of 
Lancashire is distinctively known as a cotton-spinning 
district, that portion of it which lies immediately 
around Lancaster town and forms its beautiful setting 
is a fine, rich agricultural sweep of land rolling pretty 
much as do the farm-fields from Lancaster to Millers- 
ville, in Pennsylvania. It looks rather richer and 
more bountiful than our land, because the generous 
green of the meadows and fields is not broken by the 
arid lines of dusty roads and dry fences. The sweep 
around this Lancaster is one broad field of living green, 
the various divisions of property marked only by the 
darker olive shades of the hedges. The roads are nar- 

[6] 



AND LAXCASTEE, PENNSYLVANIA. 

row and deep, and so hedged by hawthorns and box and 
bushes as to be hardly seen, and not at all to break the 
picture of the landscape. 

Altogether, there is quite a family resemblance be- 
tween the two towns,— their people and life. There is 
the same size, the same equable comfort and rest and sub- 
stance, — the golden mean of blessing. The general fea- 
tures of every-day life— on the outside and out of doors 
at least — are m.uch the same. There is a reasonable 
distribution of wealth among the ]5eople of both towns, 
and a comparative freedom from want. 

Lancaster of England— with its solid structures of 
stone; its fine gray tints unbroken by the glare of red 
brick or white paint ; its old-fashioned domestic houses, 
with quaint armorial bearings or scriptural legends carved 
above the doorways ; Ndth its venerable walls and gate- 
ways clad with ivy and lichens; with its famous round 
castle, which has 

' ' Oft rolled back the tide of war, ' ' 

and from whose parapets surly cannon are even now 
trained on the peaceful fields ; with its mediaeval legacies 
of dungeon and keep; with its authentic traditions of 
Roman empire; ^^ith its towers and turrets and spires 
of modern time and use; with the British soldiery of 
to-day, brilliant in scarlet and gold, filing through its 
streets to the calls of drum and bugle; with its local 
peasant dialect, unintelligible to American ears, and the 
clang of the wooden shoe — is by far the more pictu- 
resque and impressive of the two places. 

Lancaster of Pennsylvania, however, has solid ad- 
vantages over the older city. She has already public 
buildings far beyond those of this town at the same age. 
Give the Lancaster of the Xew World one thousand 
years more and I doubt not she will be a greater city 
than even this one, and in tradition, already in her in- 
fancy, has she not the names of Muhlenberg and Mifflin 
and Fulton and Buchanan and Thaddeus Stevens,— men 
as great and historical as any of the heroes of the TTars 
of the Boses? She was for a brief space, in times of 

[7] 



LANCASTEE, ENGLAND, AND LANCASTER, PENNSYLVANIA. 

turmoil, also the capital of the nation, a seat of govern- 
ment jnst as respectable as the court of Henry IV., 
which for a short time was held here. 

. And to-day, in many of those things which mark the 
strength of this century, — in newspapers, in schools, in 
broad streets, in commodious pavements, in spacious 
hotels, in fine stores and the goods in them, — our Penn- 
sylvania town is far ahead of its respectable old English 
parent. The glory of this Lancaster lies in its past: 
ours is yet to come. 

There is one fact forces itself on one in drawing this 
parallel between the two towns from the old home site 
which is rather strange and somewhat sad. The name 
of our new Lancaster, the establishing it as the seat of 
a county of Lancaster, the naming of the streets after 
the old ones even to the detail of rank. King and Queen 
and Prince being the great streets here and the others 
mentioned minor ones, — all force the conclusion that our 
American Lancaster was laid out by Englishmen of 
Lancashire, w^ho lovingly traced in the soil of the New 
World the very lines and features of their old home. 
Yet in the county paper of to-day, on the signs of the 
shops in the streets, on the mouldering and sunken 
tombs and gravestones in the old churchyards, I have 
not found a single one of the old colonial family names 
of the Lancaster of Penn. Literally, "the places that 
once knew them know them no more." 

Lancaster, England. 



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